Developer: OverPowered Team
Publisher: Freedom Games, Freedom Family Limited
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch
Tested on: PC
Ruin Raiders – Review
Raiding dungeons with a squad of animal raiders sounds quite fun. Now that Ruin Raiders has been released for PC and consoles, you can experience just that. In Ruin Raiders, you explore dungeons with your own customizable squad of animals to reach the Gate of Dawn at the end of a massive ever-changing labyrinth of dungeons. It is said that the game has a high difficulty and will require a lot of grinding to reach the Gate of Dawn, but sadly that, and the “massive ever-changing labyrinth” part of the game’s description, are majorly exaggerated.
Story
In Ruin Raiders, there’s not really a campaign mode or a quest series you can follow. Your job in this game is to reach the end of the series of dungeons that lie ahead of you to find the Gate of Dawn. On your way through the dungeons, you’ll find some written texts, which contain the game’s lore. These vary from short texts, to complete stories divided into multiple fragments, and some can be quite fun to read. This is all you can find in the game regarding story content, but with the game being all about dungeon exploring, it doesn’t really need that much more.
Graphics
Ruin Raiders looks quite good with some nice dungeon and character designs. The dungeons look quite nice and the different animals available for your squad look great. Each dungeon has its own appearance, although we expected the game to have more dungeons than it actually has. The rooms in each dungeon are randomized with obstacles scattered in the room for cover purposes. Sadly, after playing for an hour or two, you’ve seen all the possible layouts throughout the game. The game does offer some variety by letting you enter from different directions, altering your starting position.
Sound
The sound design in this game is okay in our opinion, but it does get a little repetitive after a while. This repetitive feeling does get interrupted by a change of music when entering battle, but when the battle’s over, it will continue to play the same track you were listening to before. All the sound effects in the game are on point, with each animal having their own familiar sounds.
Gameplay
Ruin Raiders is a typical turn-based roguelike game with isometric combat similar to games like XCOM or Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. When you’re not in combat, you can freely move around the rooms, but when in combat, your squad will move in straight lines on a grid, as is also common for the aforementioned games. The game lets you start with a good and short tutorial to get familiar with the game’s controls.
This title is pretty much a traditional roguelike game where you explore randomly generated rooms, battle enemies, level up, find items, weapons, attachments, and craft from blueprints you find in chests or loot from enemies. These blueprints are used at crafting machines found in some dungeons. In each room, rocks or other obstacles will provide your squad with half or full cover, which is necessary for a tactical approach. When taking aim at enemies, a hit chance and the amount of damage will be shown to provide you with enough information to decide if you want to take the shot.
At first, you have three different animals to choose from for your squad. Each of these animals has its own skills and qualities that also fit their appearance. For example, the rhino character is bulkier with more defense and health, while the cat character can move further, etc. Each of these characters also has a skill set that gets unlocked after they level up. By investing Entium cores in their skill tree, new skills can be unlocked. Eventually, we noticed that choosing a good squad is half of the job to have a good run, and it may even allow you to already reach the end early on.
The first run is definitely meant for you to get as far as you can and gather as much Entium as possible. At this point, your characters can only reach level two and only equip low-rank items. That means that in this first run, you won’t be able to handle the stronger opponents you meet in the second dungeon. When your squad gets wiped out, you’ll return to your base in front of the dungeon and you can upgrade the various facilities there. By upgrading these facilities, you can reach higher levels, use better items, equip weapons of a higher rarity, and add more types of animals to your squad. The game basically wants you to farm Entium, which allows you to improve your facilities to get stronger, which in turn is needed to get through the harder dungeons. We did notice a bug that during crafting all our Entium was used up for one single item, which destroyed our whole progress for that specific run.
After completing the tutorial, you’ll get a screen explaining some things about the game. Among these things, there was the mention that this game is supposed to be incredibly hard and that we will die a lot. We were very surprised when we got through the third dungeon in the game and found out that we already managed to reach the Gate of Dawn and thus beat the game. The credits started rolling with no reward aside from the pure satisfaction of beating the game, which left us very sad. We were very much into the game and had no idea we were nearing the end already. At this point, we only purchased one unlock for each facility, while there are three unlocks in total. This was kind of an anticlimactic evolution for the game, making it somewhat useless to pursue upgrading the rest of your facilities.
Conclusion
Ruin Raiders is a fun turn-based roguelike game with a good combat system, a lot of items to use along your journey and a variety of different characters to create your own squad. The game definitely had us going from the start and it was very engaging to play, but it left us very disappointed when we found out that the game only has three dungeons to explore, after which the game just ends. Certainly after the text stating that this should be a hard game that requires a lot of grinding, we expected more from this game. We’d still mildly recommend this game because of its great gameplay, but be warned that experienced players may find this game fairly easy.
Ruin Raiders - Review,
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